by CCW | 24 December 2013 23:30
Christmas is too much, isn’t it? Haven’t you all said or, at least, thought that, especially in the commercial circus and all the hustle and bustle and tinsel and wrap of the last few weeks and days? What’s all the fuss? Why all the bother?
Because of what we hear and see tonight and I don’t mean Santa Claus and his reindeer and all his elfin minions that, dare I say, look a bit like child labour! No. I mean the wonder we behold in all of the words proclaimed and sung, in all the great parade of images that belong to the mystery of Christ’s Holy Birth. Well, that’s surely what you expected me to say, isn’t it! We celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, long ago and far away, and yet close at hand in head and heart for each of us now and always.
There is something quite profound and holy in Christ’s birth contained in the rich fullness of the Christmas scene. It is all too much but it is altogether about the muchness of God being with us. There is a fullness of images to Christmas that is altogether more than all our busyness. Here, tonight, in our worship we may find its meaning that redeems our frenetic and frantic activity. How?
Through thoughtful meditation and prayerful reflection upon the central mystery of the Incarnation, to use the key theological term that belongs especially to the Christian Faith. For this birth stands out as unique and different. This birth is about the union between God and Man in Jesus Christ. To understand that mystery and wonder means to think through the rich images of Christmas and embrace them in their order and truth and not to discard them and dismiss them as mere folly and fable. This means understanding one important and yet difficult thing. There are certain images which stand out and confer meaning and purpose to the all the rest without which Christmas becomes, I am afraid, just so much glitter and glitz or an exhausting fullness of everything and nothing. Not all metaphors carry the same weight of meaning; there are the greater and the lesser images.
The great and essential images are Word, Son and Light, images which convey substance and truth and which connect to the philosophical and spiritual traditions of antiquity and of Judaism and Islam. They speak to the deep meaning at the heart of Christianity. Christ is the Word and Son of the Father, the Light of God who comes to a dark and despairing world providing hope and salvation, peace and joy – things that belong essentially to our hearts and minds but are revealed in and through the things of the world. They challenge all our busyness which is always about our preoccupations, our fears and our worries about ourselves, about our world and day, about our death and dying, about our suffering and loss. Are those things to be dismissed as mere illusions? No. They are very real and the Christmas mystery speaks to all of these realities. “Christ was born for this,” as one of the carols of the season puts it. Christianity is about the fullness of images and not the emptying of them as mere illusion. It is about the ordering of our thoughts and feelings not the rejection of such things.
Which is why we hear at Christmas Eve these great and thunderous readings, these words of weight and meaning, these Scriptures full of grace and truth about the grace and truth of God with us. The lesson from The Letter to the Hebrews has an almost hymn- like quality to it as it reflects on the great pageant of God’s Word coming to us in Law and Prophecy that has its fulfillment in God having “in these last days … spoken unto us by his Son.” It is a commentary on the richness of the Hebrew Scriptures now seen in a new light yet one which is profoundly respectful of them. The Gospel reading, too, is heavy duty theology taken from the great Prologue of The Gospel according to St. John. It begins with what is the common legacy, the shared wisdom, of philosophical Pagans, Jews, Christians, and Muslims; it begins with “the Word” which was “in the beginning,” and “the Word was with God, and the Word was God” and that Word is the cause of the being of all things, “without him was not any thing made that was made,” the principle of life and light, of being and knowing, we might say, Such is the reality of the eternal Word. And that Word, too, is Light, “a light to lighten the Gentiles,” as Isaiah had foretold; “the light which lighteth every one that cometh into the world” as John says; God’s light in our dark world and our dark hearts.
The ancient understanding here is about our humanity seen in relation to the Word and Light of God. This speaks profoundly to our confusions and uncertainties about human consciousness and moral thinking. We are more though not less than our bodies and our appetites, more than simply ‘computers with meat,’ to put it crudely.
Oh, I know, it is all too much, isn’t it? Too much head-stuff and yet the wonder of this holy night is that it is all close at hand and really quite understandable. It is all there for us to see each in our own way in that crowded scene in Bethlehem. Shepherds and sheep, presumably, though it is never actually said that sheep were there; ox and ass, too, we might presume, but again nothing said about them either, let alone all the vast menagerie of creatures which holy imagination crowds into the manger at Bethlehem, presumably in a stable but, again, that is not stated either. There are rumours of Angels, those celestial no-seeums, clearly heard by the shepherds while they were “abiding in the field,” but no mention of them at the scene in Bethlehem until one appears later “to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt.” There is Joseph and Mary, a man and a woman, a Virgin and a Mother, and later there will be the Magi-Kings from Anatolia. In other words, every form of our humanity and world. What’s not to like?
To this, holy imagination adds even more – peacocks and camels, ox and ass, to name but a few. Why? Because of the overarching themes of peace and harmony between heaven and earth, between man and God, between the Creator and his creation, themes which ennoble and dignify our humanity and which challenge the nature of our relationships with one another in our world. Yet, at the heart of it all is the simple but essential idea of the union of God and man in Jesus Christ. At the heart of it all is the Christ Child, son of Mary and son of God, an image which conveys an even deeper intimacy and truth about God and our humanity. The Word made flesh is God’s eternal Word dwelling with us so that we may have our abiding in God.
This redeems our lives and gives them meaning, even the weight of eternal glory. Such is the divinum mysterium of heavenly love. “Love is in the nature of a first gift through which all gifts are given” (Thomas Aquinas). God gives himself. We are opened out to the mystery of love, to the idea of living for God and so for one another because God lives with us. It is too much because we can never exhaust its meaning.
Christmas does not belong to us; we belong to it. We are in the story of God’s Word and Truth. We are in the crowd at Bethlehem beholding the mystery of the Word made flesh; only so shall our hearts find joy and peace in the abiding love of God.
Fr. David Curry
Christmas Eve, 2013
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